Madrid

Hamlet on the Outskirts of Madrid

Rex took being boarded with his usual
grace--he howled like a demon and shit in the cage. He took his cues
from my work performance. Early in my career I had a "make no enemies"
policy...in the tight Government contracting world, what goes around
comes around. (For example, a junior tester who worked for CSC on a
State project is now our Government task manager on a USVisit contract.)
I took in the big picture of personalities and bureaucratic politics and
found the lines of cleavage to make things happen. Hari Seldon was my
role model. Big changes through small, carefully placed, seemingly
innocuous acts. The closer I get to retirement, the more I...wave my
cane? have no vested interest in being nice? move from Meyers-Briggs F
to T? tell people that they're the problem.

At any rate, I'm sure a number of people would be glad to tell you that
I needed time off. Did a redeye--got in at 1AM (7AM local). Slept
through the flight and felt surprisingly ready to do the day.

Spain is so advanced that the subway
actually goes to the airport. Maybe LAX and Dulles will catch up
someday. I'd been conditioned to think of
Spanish-speaking countries as third-worldish, so it was disconcerting
at first to have everything all European. Made a non-English vow that
worked--was able to check in, drop off luggage, ask if there was a room
available this early, all in Spanish. Big improvement since my Argentina
trip a few years back, but still short of real fluency. BTW, unlike
Latin America, the formal form is disappearing, everyone's tu.
This is the reverse of English, where the informal form is archaic
unless thou art Quaker.

Looking at the subway signs, I wonder how many people think every stop is named Salida.
(It's also a town in Colorado with a restaurant called Joe Furphy's.
Immigration made a typo when Joe immigrated from Ireland, and he decided
it wasn't worth fixing. But my favorite town name is Salsipuedes,
Mexico.)

View from Hotel Window

Hotel Atlantico was great...on the main drag, one block from the Metro
line that served both train stations (for day trips), walking distance
from the museums and, oddly, from all the funky stuff (a few pages
down). However, the entrance was so narrow that I walked past it six
times before spotting it, making me feel like a Muggle in a Harry Potter
movie.

Spanish architecture runs to stunning on a
large scale. This is the Cathedral of Saint....oh wait, it's the Post
Office. So many of the buildings are essentially too big to photograph.
Only Madrid's wide avenues made this possible. It's a big city, but
not overpowering like New York or DC.

Madrid is all about the arts. With the sparkling sun, trendy people and
Spanish architecture, it's what LA could have been if it had dedicated
itself to high art instead of pop culture.

When I got off the plane in India ready for
Indian food, I ran straight into a hot dog stand. In Madrid, the first
thing I spotted was an "irresitable!!! American breakfast". Same
principle. Oh, and here's the hot dog stand. (In Australia they're
always "American hot dogs". Maybe they want to make sure we take the
blame.) Another food surprise: Buffalo wing have inflitrated tapas menus.

The defeatingly large Prado. It's not wide but it goes on
forever and there's a basement. More than 100 rooms full of big canvases
by big names--Goya, Velasquez, Greco, Rembrandt and van Dyck all had
several rooms to themselves.. What struck me the most were the
anachronisms...a photorealistic Adoration of the Magi from the 1500s,
Christ with his hand on a pretty damned accurate painting of the Earth
from Space, El Grecko's St. Anthony with his head tilted like a college
student about to make a snarky remark about being shot full of arrows.
Got the dreaded pies de Prado here (my new name for sore feet).

Artsy lunch at the Prado. I hate my camera--resolution is
fine but there are autofocus failures and dismal low-light performance,
causing over-reliance on the flash that prevents me from taking covert
pictures such as a picture of the guy taking covert pictures of the
pictures with his iPhone.

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Of course I tried all the restaurants. Here's the world's best sopa de mariscos.
Yet Jaleo in DC has as tapas as good as any, and better than most of
Spain. Concluded that Spanish food is as good as the chef.

The English sides of menus made me aware of the dangers of
overtranslation, undertranslation, mistranslaction, phonetic
translation. The fish of the day is golden? Oh, Dorado--actually Dorada in
Spain. Crepes of cigars with sauce of ants? (Need my dictionary.)
Dead of Chocolate? (Close but no cigar.) And back at the hotel, what's
champu? Oh.

Speaking of which, why do no hotels have washclothes? Why is there a
no smoking sign and two ashtrays? Why does the lamp have a pull cord
that's nonfunctional--there's a switch? Why are there no-hitchhiking
icons on subway cars? (Discovered that if you look very closely, it's a
"don't pull the doors apart" icon that happens to have a raised thumb.)
And when is the subway door going to open? (While I was waiting, someone
pulled the handle, making me think of the Cheech and Chong movie where
Cheech is climbing over a huge wrought iron gate into an estate when
Chong swings the gate open and walks in.) And why does no one drink
milk?

Except in horchata. For shame, Mexico! Spanish horchata is made with
evaporated milk, not skim milk. And it has ground ice like a granita.
I'm spoiled now.

This is the reason I was able to have the sopa twice. Spent two hours on foot
trying to find the restaurant again en vano. Then went back to the hotel, looked
up this picture, and googlemapped it.

This picture is remarkable for what's not there. The municipal
parking garage is under the this circle.
Instead of building a 14-story office building in the center, they built a
performing arts plaza.